What do Docker, GitHub, Postman, and Elastic have in common?
They all started by winning over developers with free tools or open-source offerings, spreading organically within teams. Their bottom-up growth led to broader adoption across organizations, eventually evolving into enterprise solutions with paid tiers. This freemium-to-enterprise strategy—focused on community first, sales later—has become the playbook for modern dev tools.
Before we started working on OpenFunnel, we only knew about Docker, Github, Postman and Elastic as happy users, maybe even fanboys. Now, we associate a bunch of jargon with them like :
top-down, bottom-up, growth, developer-led, enterprise...the list goes on. We have been fascinated and enamored by the maze of developer tool adoption and sales. But why is this a big thing to solve for? Why should we spend 80 hour weeks on this problem? Let us go back to developers and developer tools for a moment.
Developer Tools are systems, packages, APIs and frameworks that we use as developers every single day. They enable and power every single piece of software we see around us - the Waymo picking us up in SF, or the GPT inside ChatGPT - everything was built using multiple high quality developer tools that simply worked. And the reason they just worked was a combination of great engineering and mind blowing yet painstakingly created and executed GTM strategies that enabled them to make money, sustain, and iterate on their products.
GTM or Go-To-Market for Developer Tools is a different kind of maze than GTM for traditional SaaS. You want developer buy-in, but individual developers do not pay as much, are resistant to change, do not like being sold to and only use you if you solve their problems quickly, correctly and repeatedly. Developers are a tough crowd to please(we know). On the flip side, you want Enterprise(jargon for big companies with big teams and big money) to buy your Dev Tool but when your initial VP contact who loved your pitch talks to their engineers, they seem to have never heard of you - deal killer.
What do you do now? It is a chicken and egg problem. You cannot sell to Big Customers because developers do not know you and developers do not know you because you are not big yet. You have to grow, build an opinionated and tasteful developer tool that works out of the box, scales to production, is easy to get started,
and at the same time, you have to build a developer community, keep them engaged and solve their problems,
and at the same time(yes I used it for a third time), talk to Enterprise to get big deals so that you keep this cycle going.
It is A LOT. We know. And that's why we got into this. We think that we have got a problem worth solving for, and we want all of our favorite Developer tools(and their competitors) to be our happy customers. Gotta catch 'em all!